Man Ray

Man Ray was the American photographer, painter, and filmmaker at the center of Dada and Surrealism in Paris. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, he arrived in Montparnasse in July 1921 as the closest ally of Marcel Duchamp from their New York Dada years, and within a few years his studio was where the quarter went to be photographed — Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean Cocteau all sat for him. Alongside the portraits he invented the cameraless rayograph, made four Surrealist films, and produced Le Violon d'Ingres, the 1924 photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse that set the auction record for a photograph in 2022.

From Brooklyn to New York Dada

He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky on 27 August 1890 in Philadelphia. The family moved to Brooklyn around 1897 and later shortened its surname to Ray; Emmanuel became Man Ray and kept the invented name for the rest of his life. After high school he turned down an architecture scholarship to paint, and supported himself in Manhattan as a commercial artist and technical illustrator. In 1914 he married the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix; they separated in 1919, though the divorce waited until 1937.

He met Marcel Duchamp in the mid-1910s in the small artists' colony at Ridgefield, New Jersey, and the two ran New York's Dada experiments together for the next half decade. Among their productions was Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp's female alter ego, whom Man Ray photographed around 1920.

The photographer of Montparnasse

He reached Paris on 22 July 1921, and Duchamp introduced him to the Paris Dadaists on arrival. He settled in Montparnasse and stayed, with one long wartime interruption, for the rest of his life.

Portrait photography paid for everything else, and the client list became a census of the quarter. In 1922 he photographed Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas beneath the paintings in the atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus; Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas records the visits to his tiny hotel-room studio. The Getty's holdings of his portraits include Henry Miller alongside Joyce, Stein, and Pablo Picasso.

In the darkroom in 1922 he began laying objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light. Twelve of the resulting images were published that year as the portfolio Champs délicieux, with a preface by the Dada poet Tristan Tzara, and the pictures became known as rayographs, after their maker.

When Surrealism organized itself out of Paris Dada, Man Ray went with it as the movement's house photographer. He photographed Gala Dalí, and one of the portraits appeared in Salvador Dalí's 1930 book La Femme visible.

Kiki and Lee Miller

For most of the 1920s he lived with Kiki de Montparnasse, the artists' model and cabaret singer born Alice Prin, and she became his most frequent model. In 1924 he photographed her bare back and added the two f-holes of a violin to the print. The result, Le Violon d'Ingres, is his best-known image; in May 2022 a print of it sold at Christie's for $12.4 million, the record for any photograph at auction.

Lee Miller, a young American model who intended to become a photographer, arrived at his studio in 1929. For three years she was his student, collaborator, and lover, and together they reworked solarization — the partial reversal of tones that rims a printed figure with a dark line — into a technique both used for the rest of their careers.

The films

He made four short films of his own during the Paris decade:

• Le Retour à la raison (1923), made partly without a camera by scattering salt, pepper, pins, and tacks over raw film stock, with Kiki striped in bands of light for the finale.
• Emak-Bakia (1926), a self-described cinépoème restaging his photographic experiments, with Kiki again on screen.
• L'Étoile de mer (1928), built on a poem by Robert Desnos, with Kiki in the lead.
• Les Mystères du château de Dé (1929), financed by Charles de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure and shot at their modernist villa in Hyères.

He worked on other people's films too. In René Clair's Entr'acte (1924) he and Duchamp play chess on the roof of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées until a jet of water sweeps the game away, and in 1926 he filmed Duchamp's spinning word-discs for Anémic Cinéma.

Hollywood, and the return to Paris

The German occupation ended the first Paris period. He left France in the summer of 1940, reached the United States in August, and settled in Los Angeles for a decade of painting and teaching — he insisted throughout his life that painting, not photography, was his real medium. In October 1946 he married the dancer Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills, in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

In 1951 the couple returned to Paris and took an apartment and studio on rue Férou, a short street beside the Luxembourg Gardens, where he worked for another quarter century. He died in Paris on 18 November 1976, at eighty-six, and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery under the epitaph he chose: 'Unconcerned, but not indifferent.' Juliet was later buried with him; her stone reads 'Together again.'